The Following article originated at and
is taken from DiscoverTheNetworks.com

Founded in 1970 as a loose assortment of
Canadian anti-nuclear agitators, American expatriates and
underground journalists calling themselves the Don’t Make a Wave
Committee, Greenpeace is today the most influential group of the
environmental Left. Greenpeace conceived its current name after one
of its activists, Bob Hunter, had an epiphany. As Hunter tells the
story on the organization’s web site, “Somebody flashed two fingers as we were leaving the church basement and said
‘Peace!’” When social worker and activist Bill Darnell added, “Let's
make it a Green Peace,” the group’s founding members, mesmerized,
immediately settled on a new name.

As its maiden act, the group of still-green activists set sail on a
halibut trawler called the Phyllis McCormack. The crew—a motley
collection of activists who shared a common affection for environmentalist rabble
rousing—traveled from Vancouver, Canada, to Amchitka Island, a part
of the Aleutian Island chain. As Bob Hunter explained in his
chronicle of the journey, The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An
Environmental Odyssey, "We had the biggest concentration of tree-huggers, radicalized students,
garbage-dump stoppers, shit-disturbing unionists, freeway fighters,
pot smokers and growers, aging Trotskyites, condo killers, farmland
savers, fish preservationists, animal rights activists, back-to-the-landers,
vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists, and anti-spraying, anti-pollution
marchers and picketers in the country, per capita, in the world.”

Their intention was to disrupt an underground U.S. nuclear weapons test.
“A boat on a nuclear test site—that's a clear message,” Rex
Weyler, a draft dodger and journalist who wrote a reverent history
of the group, called Greenpeace, later
explained.
It was also in line with the group’s core philosophy, a largely faith-based
confection of pacifism and environmentalist ardor. Fundamentally
opposed to nuclear weapons, Greenpeace activists also claimed that
the testing of the weapons on Amchitka would exact irreparable harm
to the local sea otter population.

On one level, the mission proved a failure. The bomb was
successfully exploded before the Phyllis McCormack managed
to sail into the sea off the island coast and prevent the testing.
Not all was lost, however. In failing, Greenpeace had hit upon what
would become its signature strategy in the succeeding years:
manipulating, and often flat-out inventing the facts to suit its
environmentalist agenda. Prior to the boat’s departure, Greenpeace
floated the claim that the testing of a nuclear weapon off of
Amchitka could trigger a powerful earthquake. In turn, this would
unleash a tidal wave that, as Hunter put it, “would slam the lips of
the Pacific rim like a series of karate chops.” Alarming on their
face, such claims had no basis in fact, something Hunter would later
confess in his book, The Greenpeace Chronicles. Wrote Hunter:
“We painted a rather extravagant picture…tidal waves, earthquakes, radioactive death
clouds, decimated fisheries, deformed babies. We never said that’s
what would happen, only that it could happen.” Hunter nevertheless
justified the organization’s calculated mendacity on the grounds
that “children all over Canada were having dreams about bombs.” A
lie was therefore justified by the greater environmentalist good. It
would not be the last time that a Greenpeace activist would invoke
that rule to justify a deceitful campaign.

When, in the wake of the nuclear test, the promised environmental
horrors failed to materialize, Greenpeace casually manufactured new
ones. Thus the group claimed that the explosion had resulted in the
deaths of upward of 1,000 sea otters. That much of the evidence was
speculative, and the organization’s only tangible proof – the bodies
of 23 sea otters (with no conclusive information about the cause of
death) – came nowhere near corroborating its inflated charges, did
not hinder Greenpeace from confidently pronouncing the tests an
unmitigated disaster for the island’s ecology. In a 1996
report, Greenpeace blamed the dearth of incriminating evidence
on “weather conditions,” which the group insisted had “pushed
carcasses away from the shore.” Stormy weather was also the
organization’s culprit of choice to explain away its failure to
measure the impact of the testing on other marine life. For all its
apologias, the group now acknowledged that, despite its grim
warnings to the contrary, “[i]n
the long term, populations of animal species at Amchitka will
recover from the direct physical impacts of the nuclear explosions…”

Back in the 1970s, Greenpeace was disinclined to dwell on such
inconsistencies. The group had a reputation to build. Preferring to
minimize its failure to stop the nuclear test, the organization and
its sympathizers seized on the “Amchitka action” to announce
Greenpeace as an environmentalist force to be reckoned with. “For us
it was a sign of hope that people can change things,” one of the
group’s co-founders, Jim Bohlen, later
said. “And our action gave the entire ecology movement a new
name: Green. That was better than ecology—a word hardly anyone
understood.”

A word most everyone understood was intimidation, and Greenpeace has
practiced it with unrelenting zeal throughout its controversial
history. Where its environmental positions have been unfounded in
substance—a not uncommon occurrence—Greenpeace has relied on scare
tactics to right the balance. Indeed, as Rex Weyler, an American
draft dodger and Greenpeace biographer has admitted, the forecasts
of imminent environmental disaster with which the organization has
come to be identified are often at sharp variance with scientific reality.
“There's no clear evidence that people will die,” Weyler has
said of
the Greenpeace tendency to foment fear by invoking, on no sound
evidence, the putative human threats of the various initiatives it
has opposed.

Lack of evidence, however, has
not stopped Greenpeace from propagating its radical agenda. In the
early 1990s, for instance, after years of sustained attacks on the
whaling and fishing industries, Greenpeace turned its sights on
another supposed aquatic threat: chlorine. At the time, Greenpeace
asserted that it would accept nothing less than the blanket
prohibition of the hated element. “There
are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe,”
declared
Greenpeace activist Joe Thornton, the author of Pandora’s Poison,
an environmentalist screed advocating a global ban on the use of
chlorine. What Thornton and his Greenpeace cohorts chose to ignore
was the demonstrable fact that chlorine, far from the uniquely
dangerous threat of their imaginings, was one of the most important
public health innovations in history, not least for its role in
purifying and disinfecting water.

The consequences of the group’s scientifically illiterate campaign
against chorine would prove grave. In 1999, Walkerton, Ontario,
became a disaster scene when an outbreak of E. Coli bacteria gripped
the small Canadian town. Subsequent investigation revealed that the
town’s water wells were not outfitted with the standard chlorination
systems. It later emerged that one reason for the tragic oversight
was that the manager of Walkerton’s water works, one Stan Koebel,
admitted to having “heard” that chorine was harmful—a claim that
Greenpeace had spent the decade popularizing in Canada. Swayed by
environmentalist fear mongering against chlorine, Koebel had failed
to properly purify the town’s water supply. Contaminated manure from
adjacent farms was thus allowed to leech into the town’s wells following
the springtime rains. After drinking the water, seven Walkerton citizens
died; as many as 2,000 reportedly became ill.

Equally misguided has been Greenpeace’s adamant hostility to
biotechnological crops. Science is not on the organization’s side:
Biotechnology not only allows for the manufacture of a greater
quantity of food but also offers environmental benefits by reducing
the use of chemical pesticides in food production. Impervious to
that reality, Greenpeace has called for a global ban of biotech
crops. Scare tactics are, typically, its preferred form of
opposition. Under cover of “direct action,” Greenpeace has long
vandalized private farms that use biotechnology to genetically
modify foods. Rather than acknowledge their repeated violations of
the law, Greenpeace members cloak their criminality in euphemism.
Greenpeace press
releases routinely describe vandalism of private farms thusly:
"At 5:15 a.m. today in a peaceful direct action, a Greenpeace decontamination
unit removed genetically modified pollution from the third
farm-scale experiment to be disrupted in the U.K. over the last
eight weeks." Through such linguistic alchemy is a transparently
unlawful act transformed into “peaceful direct action.”

On occasion, Greenpeace has combined such direct action with
disinformation campaigns. Among the most prominent examples in
recent history was the organization’s attempt to lay siege—both
literally and figuratively—to the Brent Spar oil tanker operated by
the Shell oil company. When, in 1995, the tanker announced its
intention to shuttle its disused platforms off the coast of
Scotland, Greenpeace waged an international media campaign against
the decision, which it characterized as an environmental tragedy in
waiting. Not content to demand the worldwide boycott of all Shell
fill-up stations, Greenpeace activists stormed the tanker and
proceeded to occupy it for the duration of three weeks. Negative
publicity sparked by the Greenpeace campaign coupled with
well-justified concerns about a loss of revenue—in Germany, Shell
stations reportedly suffered losses of up to fifty percent during
the campaign—prompted Shell to abandon its plans for the Brent Spar.
The environmentalist group hailed this decision as a “victory for
the environment.”

But its elation was short-lived. A critical element of the
Greenpeace campaign—its estimate of the amount of leftover oil in
the tanker—collapsed under examination. Facing sudden skepticism,
Greenpeace was compelled to admit that the 5,500 tons of oil it
alleged remained in rig’s storage tanks was a gross exaggeration.
Further inquiry revealed that Greenpeace had not actually sampled
the Brent Spar’s storage tanks but had instead based its
findings—and the crux of its campaign—on a sample taken from a vent
pipe. At considerable cost to its reputation, Greenpeace was forced
to acknowledge that its “improvised
measurements had been taken from the wrong part of the Spar,
resulting in a significant overestimation of the amount of oil left
in the storage tanks.” Today, in a naked attempt to save face,
Greenpeace
claims that, even if had erred in publicizing erroneous claims
about the environmental effects of scuttling the Brent Spar, it was
nonetheless justified in waging its campaign against the decision on
the grounds that it opposes any scuttling in the ocean—a statement
far removed from its earlier efforts to cast Shell as an aggressive
polluter eager to contaminate the seas with unused oil. Not for the
first time in the organization’s history, larger environmentalist
aims justified a factually dubious campaign.

Since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, Greenpeace has focused
its efforts on obstructing the efforts of the coalition that toppled
the regime of
Saddam Hussein. In January of 2003, a gang of 25 activists
aboard the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior
attempted to blockade a British military supply port. Leaving no
doubt about the organization’s subversive agenda, a Greenpeace
spokeswoman said of the blockade: “We
want to cut the military supply chain to the war in Iraq.”
Greenpeace staged a nearly identical
action in March
of 2003, when the Rainbow
Warrior led a procession of activist-laden rafts in attempting
to blockade a joint U.S.-Spanish naval base in southwestern Spain.
Their mission: to prevent an American freighter from delivering
supplies to coalition forces in the Gulf. Targeting yet another
member of the military coalition, Greenpeace activists that same
month attempted to block
off the residence of Australian Prime Minister John Howard,
citing Australia’s support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as
their motivation. In the Netherlands, Greenpeace blockaded a ship
transporting U.S. military equipment, which the group claimed was
bound for Iraq.

Having militantly opposed the liberation of Iraq, Greenpeace today
postures as a watchdog of Iraqi welfare. In particular, Greenpeace
blames coalition forces for failing to prevent the looting of small
amounts of enriched uranium following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s
government. Refusing to acknowledge the benefits that have redounded
to a newly democratic Iraq as a consequence of the war, Greenpeace
persists in
claiming that the “only winners in this story are those who are
looking to capitalize on security failures by scoring loose nukes.”

Though it failed to prevent the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the
browbeating tactics regularly deployed by Greenpeace have in the
past been successful. Among the most notorious of its successes was
the Greenpeace campaign against the healthcare company Novartis AG.
In 1999, after getting word that the company was using biotech crops
to produce its line of Gerber baby foods, Greenpeace activists faxed
a menacing letter “To the CEO” (Greenpeace did not bother to find
out who that was). Demanded the letter: “Does Gerber use genetically
engineered products in its baby food? If so, which products? What
steps have you taken, if any, to ensure that you are not using
[biotech crops]?” Eager to avoid a damaging public relations row
over the justice of using the crops, whose presence in the foods was
perfectly safe, Novartis quickly capitulated, pledging to refrain
from any future use of biotechnology in its food products.
Intimidation tactics had once again triumphed over science.

In keeping with its dogmatic opposition to biotech foods, Greenpeace
has positioned itself as a leading opponent of one of the most
promising developments in food research: a particularly nutritious
strain of rice, created by means of gene splicing, known as “yellow
rice” or Golden rice (so called for the color of its grains).
Following its creation in 2000, the rice, with its unusually high
level of vitamin A, has emerged as a boon to developing countries,
where malnutrition and vitamin deficiency are leading causes of
common and often fatal ailments.

Greenpeace fiercely opposes it.
As Greenpeace sees it, yellow rice is a deception perpetrated on the
world by wealthy developers, a claim it attempts to bolster by
contending that for the rice to have any nutritional benefits an
adult "would have to eat around 9kg [19.8 pounds] of cooked rice
daily to satisfy his/her daily need of vitamin A." But the claim is
a willful misreading of the science evidence. Greenpeace’s
allegations quite apart, even small servings of yellow rice are
effective vitamin supplements. In developing countries, where the
effects of poverty are felt most acutely, the rice literally saves
lives. Nonetheless, Greenpeace, along with likeminded
environmentalist groups and non-governmental organizations, is bent
on impeding its further development. Benedikt Haerlin, an
international coordinator for Greenpeace, has spearheaded the
opposition, even threatening to carry out the organization’s
patented “direct action” campaigns to destroy test plants.

Unwavering opposition to technological progress has driven many
former Greenpeace activists from its ranks. Dr. William Plaxton,
a professor of biochemistry at Queens University in Ontario and Dr.
Barry Palevitz, a professor of botany at the University of Georgia,
both terminated their Greenpeace membership in the late 1990s in
protest against its unconsidered opposition to biotechnology.

Among the most prominent of the
defectors is Patrick Moore. A co-founder of Greenpeace who has
become a passionate critic of the group he parented, Moore takes
particular exception to the Greenpeace position on biotech foods. “Greenpeace
activists threaten to rip the biotech rice out of the fields if
farmers dare to plant it,” Moore has said. “They have done
everything they can to discredit the scientists and the technology.”
Moore has also condemned the group’s attempts to obstruct the
development of yellow rice, noting that the “risk of not allowing
farmers in Africa and Asia to grow Golden Rice is that another 2.5
million children will probably go blind.” Moore, who parted ways
with Greenpeace after 15 years, has also castigated the
organization’s extreme political agenda. Commenting on the
precipitous dwindling of Greenpeace membership in recent years—the
organization’s membership has plummeted from a peak of one million
in the early 1990s to around 300,000 by 2005—Moore has attributed
the decline to the fact that Greenpeace has become “dominated by
leftwingers and extremists who disregard science in the pursuit of
environmental purity.”

Moore is hardly the only disaffected Greenpeace member to hold that view. Another outspoken
critic of Greenpeace is Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of
statistics and a onetime Greenpeace member. Though Lomborg had grown
skeptical of the organization’s dogmatic adherence to the gospel of
environmentalism, his decisive break from Greenpeace came in August
of 2002, when he published a book entitled
The Skeptical Environmentalist. In it, Lomborg offered a rigorous debunking of
environmentalist claims. Lomborg noted that, Greenpeace’s
doom-saying notwithstanding, the world’s environmental resources
were not being depleted; that the disastrous consequences of global
warming were greatly exaggerated; and that the continued
technological development of the world would improve the quality of
life for all people without ushering in the environmental apocalypse
long forecast by Greenpeace with Nostradamus-like conviction.
Against Greenpeace’s frantic claim that the rain forests “are in
crisis,” Lomborg sensibly
explained that with the advancement of technological progress,
developing countries would be able to devote more time and resources
to environmental concerns. “It's a temporary problem,” wrote Lomborg.
“We won't lose the rainforest forever." Lomborg’s amply-documented
challenge to the ideology of environmentalism unsurprisingly earned
him a swift excommunication.

Even within the structural hierarchy of Greenpeace, dissent has
manifested itself. After a schism in the late 1970s, the various
organizations originally comprising Greenpeace have today united
into 41 affiliates and two main branches, Greenpeace USA and
the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International. One group that has
bitterly parted ways with Greenpeace is the Hawaii-based
Greenpeace Foundation, Inc. Indeed, the Greenpeace Foundation
is today a prominent adversary of Greenpeace, deploring the
organization’s descent into outright anti-Americanism—for instance,
when Greenpeace took up the cause of Europe’s anti-American nuclear
disarmament movement in the 1980s. Moreover, according to the
Greenpeace Foundation, Greenpeace International has
contemplated a campaign to shutter all American corporations
that failed to provide it with donations. Another charge advanced by
the Greenpeace Foundation is that Greenpeace has failed adequately
to address the issue of wildlife preservation, especially with
regard to the protection of dolphins. Perhaps the most serious of
the charges that the Greenpeace Foundation has directed at its
estranged relative is that the organization has made use of
unethical fundraising methods. For instance, the Greenpeace
Foundation notes that a San Francisco branch of Greenpeace used a
national direct-mail fundraising scheme to solicit millions of
dollars, which it declined to share with other Greenpeace groups.

A more extensive expose of the organization’s duplicitous
fundraising practices was carried out in 2003 by Public Interest Watch (PIW), a nonprofit
watchdog group. PIW conducted an in-depth investigation of the
organization’s financial records and published a
report disclosing that the organization takes advantage of its
tax-exempt status to launder funds. “These funds,” PIW noted, “are
then passed to other Greenpeace corporations that use them for
non-exempt – and often illegal – purposes.” Specifically, PIW
uncovered that Greenpeace uses its Greenpeace Fund, a tax-exempt
entity debarred from engaging in political advocacy and lobbying
under section (501)(c)(3) of the IRS tax code, to direct funds to
Greenpeace Inc., a tax-exempt organization permitted to engage in
lobbying and advocacy under section (501)(c)(4) of the tax code, but
not to accept tax-deductible funds – such as it routinely accepted,
in direct contravention of the law, from the Greenpeace Fund. PIW
calculated that in 1999, some 30 percent of Greenpeace’s $14.2
million budget – $4.25 million – was provided by the Greenpeace
Fund. That sum was exceeded the following year, when the Greenpeace
Fund contributed $4.5 million to Greenpeace, Inc. In total, PIW
estimated that between 1998 and 2000, Greenpeace disbursed $24
million to internal entities prohibited by the law from accepting
tax-exempt contributions.

To obscure the legally dubious money trail, Greenpeace made a point
on its tax forms of reporting the funds as intended for “general
support,” a purposely vague description that revealed little about
the purposes to which the funds were put. But PIW offered a clue by
noting the following efforts undertaken by Greenpeace Inc. in
previous years:

In forms filed with the Florida Department of Agriculture and
Consumer Services in 1999, 2000 and 2001, Greenpeace Fund, Inc.
indicated its purpose for soliciting contributions as being to
promote the preservation and protection of the environment
through, among other things, direct action campaigns.

In 2000, Greenpeace Fund, Inc. contributed $625,902 to the
Genetic Engineering Campaign, which is a “campaign against
genetically engineered foods” wherein “Greenpeace seeks the
complete elimination of genetically modified organisms from the
food supply and environment.”

In 1999, Greenpeace Fund, Inc. granted $485,8000 to Action
Resources, which deals with the planning and execution of
demonstrations and direct actions, many of which involve illegal
activities such as banner hangs, blocking access to private
roads, and trespassing on military bases.

Nor was this the only instance in which Greenpeace activists had run
afoul of the law. PIW adduced a long list of illegal activities
involving the organization’s members over the years. It included:

Four Greenpeace activists were detained by Spanish authorities
after tying themselves to the mast and anchor of a ship they
accused of carrying wood procured from illegal logging.

Five protestors were arrested at a government research farm in
Manitoba, after they had padlocked gates to the research
facility and unfurled signs from the roof.

Gibraltar police arrested eight Greenpeace activists during a
protest against an aging oil tanker. They were detained after
two Greenpeace activists boarded the 24 year-old Vemamagna
tanker and unfurled a banner that read “Oil Hazard.”

More than 30 protestors broke into the central control building
of a nuclear power station in eastern England. On a previous
occasion, more than 100 Greenpeace activists had broken into the
same plant and were arrested.

Twelve Greenpeace activists entered an Estonian port and scaled
the lines of a single hulled oil tanker. Seven were arrested.

Two Greenpeace employees boarded the APL Jade and three
boats blocked the ship until they were stopped by the Coast
Guard in southern Florida. Prosecutors say the protestors
erroneously believed the cargo ship contained contraband Amazon
mahogany.

According to a
December 20, 2005 New York Times report ("F.B.I. Watched
Activist Groups, New Files Show"), "the F.B.I. investigated possible
financial ties between [Greenpeace] members and militant groups like
the
Earth Liberation Front and the
Animal Liberation Front."

American Friends Service Committee (6/27/2011)
The Sierra Club (6/28/2011)
The Thunder Road Group (6/29/2011)
Americans United For Change (6/30/2011)
Change America Now (7/1/2011)
New Organizing Institute (7/2/2011)

SERIES TO CONTINUE AROUND AUGUST 21st

We believe that the Constitution of the
United States speaks for itself. There is no need to rewrite, change
or reinterpret it to suit the fancies of special interest groups or
protected classes.